Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (25 page)

“We did not abandon it. We passed it on. The Annurian state had grown too large for one man to control. Rebels and rival claimants rent the land. Terial had heard of the gates and realized the power they held for his own political ends. An Emperor who could instantly visit any corner of his empire need not fear rebellions of distant commanders or the misleading reports of provincial ministers. An Emperor able to use the gates could bring unity and stability to entire continents.”

“He made a deal with the Shin,” Kaden said, the pieces falling into place.

Scial Nin nodded. “If they would teach him the secret of the gates, the
vaniate,
he would commit his imperial resources to keeping those gates against the return of the Csestriim. The Shin, who had long ago lost both the ability and the will to carry out their original task, agreed. From that time on, all heirs to the Malkeenian line have trained here, with us. It is no coincidence that they have also enjoyed an unbroken line of succession.”

“Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, repeating the old title, understanding it for the first time. “We’re guarding against the Csestriim.”

“You should be,” Tan replied curtly. “But memory is short.”

“There are those,” Nin said, nodding toward Kaden’s
umial,
“who believe the Shin should never have given over their charge, who believe that the Emperors neglect their responsibility.”

Kaden turned back to Rampuri Tan. The man stood in the shadow, arms crossed over his chest, eyes dark in the dim light of the study. He didn’t move, or speak, or shift his gaze from his pupil.

“You don’t believe they’re gone, do you?” Kaden asked quietly. “You’re not training me to be a monk or to rule an empire. You’re training me to fight the Csestriim.”

For several heartbeats, Tan didn’t respond. That implacable stare bored into Kaden as though seeking out the hidden secrets of his heart.

“It seems the Csesriim are dead,” the monk said at last.

“Then why are you telling me this?”

“In case they are not.”

17

“She lied,” Valyn insisted, slamming his fist down onto the table. “The ’Kent-kissing bitch
lied.
”

“Fine,” Lin responded. “She lied. Saying it over and over again isn’t going to help.”

“Although it
is
nice to get a firm grip on the facts,” Laith added, his voice too serious for the jest.

It was late—most of the soldiers were racked in their bunks or out on night training somewhere—and the three of them had the long, empty mess hall to themselves. Most of the place lay shrouded in darkness—no point in wasting good oil lighting a room with no one in it—but down at the far end of the space, through the open door leading into the kitchens, Valyn could make out flickering lamps and the humming of Jared, the old night cook, as he went about his business grilling pork for the next day’s lunch and keeping the kettle of tea boiling for soldiers returning late from their training. Laith had kindled the lamp above their own table, although he kept the wick barely long enough for Valyn to see the features of his friends. The flier was pushed back on the back legs of his chair, gazing up into the rafters. Lin’s hair glistened in the lamplight, still damp from her long swim.

She held up her hands in conciliation. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about Annick, but are you
sure?
You told me Fane held up the knot afterwards, that it was a normal bowline.”

Valyn tensed, then forced himself to take a deep breath. She was just trying to help, trying to sort through the facts with him.

“I managed to untie part of it before I blacked out,” he explained. “I panicked at the end, but I remember the knot clearly enough. It
felt
like a basic bowline, but it wasn’t. It had those two extra loops—the kind we found in the knot that was holding up Amie.”

“Well,” Laith pointed out, lowering the front feet of his chair to the ground and pursing his lips, “there’s no
rule
that she has to give you an easy knot. It would be just like Annick to try to drown you on principle.”

“It would,” Lin admitted. “But why would she
lie
about it?”

Lin still wasn’t convinced that Annick was behind Amie’s death, and her refusal to accept the reality of the situation was starting to grate on Valyn. Normally Lin was objective and clear-sighted, but there was something about Amie’s murder that she couldn’t see past, as though, because of the nature of the violence, it had to have been committed by a man.

“Because she knows,” he snapped. “That’s the only explanation. She knows we found Amie—everyone on Hook probably knows that by now. And if she’s got a brain in her head, she can figure out we were asking questions at the Black Boat.”

“So … what?” Lin asked. “She decides to kill all four of us? And Rianne, too, for good measure? Even if she
did
kill Amie, that’s an insane way to cover it up.”

“From Annick?” Laith asked, raising an eyebrow. “That actually sounds like a somewhat measured response.”

“I don’t claim to have it all figured out,” Valyn went on. “All I’m saying is there’s too much coincidence here to ignore. She might even have something to do with—”

Lin shot him a sharp glance and he cut himself off. He’d been about to say the sniper might have something to do with the plot against his own life, which meant she might know something about the death of his father, about threats to Kaden. Only he had told no one aside from Lin about the words of the dying Aedolian. It was a measure of his fatigue that he almost slipped in front of Laith.

“Have something to do with what?” the youth asked.

“My bow,” Lin supplied smoothly. “Cracked in the middle of my last sniper test. Valyn thinks someone sabotaged it.”

Laith eyed one, then the other, then shrugged. “Trial’s coming up. It’s going to be people rather than bows cracking before the whole thing’s finished.”

“Provided we make it to the ’Kent-kissing Trial,” Valyn added, turning to Lin. “All I’m saying is to go to the list. Then tell me if you don’t think Annick looks bloody as a slaughterhouse floor.”

“All right,” Lin said, her eyes bright in the lamplight. “Let’s go to the list.”

The Kettral were great believers in lists. The soldiers had lists for everything—checking over a bird before flight, setting a demolitions charge, boarding a ship—
everything.
Valyn could hear old Georg the Tanner’s voice droning on in the lecture hall:
People make mistakes. Soldiers make mistakes. Everyone else on this ’Shael-spawned island is filling your tiny little heads with ideas about spontaneity, adaptation, thinking on the fly.
He spat.
Thinking on the fly is a good way to make mistakes. Lists do not make mistakes.
Georg’s voice could put a roomful of cadets to sleep in a matter of heartbeats, but the man had flown missions well into his sixties, and Valyn tried to listen to what he had to say.
You fools want to know how something gets added to the list? A soldier dies. Then we figure out why. Then we change the list. So learn the fucking list.

Unfortunately, there was no list, no set of steps for ferreting out a traitor and a murderer, but a jolt of logical thinking couldn’t hurt.

“First,” Valyn began, raising a finger, “we know that Amie was going to meet a Kettral the morning she was murdered. Second, she was meeting that person in Manker’s. Third, according to Juren, the only Kettral in Manker’s that morning was Annick. Fourth, Annick is a cold-blooded bitch.”

“Your fourth observation seems more emotional than analytical,” Lin pointed out.

“
Fifth,
the way Amie was killed suggests both Kettral professionalism and a complete absence of moral sentiment. Sixth, that strange bowline shows up in both the garret where Amie was killed and the boat where I was thrown overboard today. And seventh, Annick tries to drown me a day and a half after we find the body and start asking questions.”

Oh,
Valyn thought to himself,
and finally, there’s a plot to kill my entire family and take over the throne.

“When you put it like that, she doesn’t exactly come out looking like a priestess of Eira,” Laith observed.

“All right,” Lin said, nodding hear head wearily. “I agree. It looks bad for Annick. But it still doesn’t make any sense. Why would she want to kill Amie? And why in such a horrible way?”

“That’s the one I can’t answer.”

“I suppose sheer unbuckled cruelty isn’t reason enough?” Laith asked.

Valyn frowned. Maybe he was overthinking it. Even if Annick had killed Amie, maybe the murder had nothing to do with the plot against him. It seemed plausible that the sniper might just truss up someone and kill her for the practice. Only killing a whore who wasn’t much more than a girl wouldn’t be much practice. And it still didn’t explain the knot that had almost drowned him earlier in the day.

“I just think we need more information,” Lin said.

Valyn nodded slowly. “And I know one place to start looking.”

*   *   *

In theory, rummaging through someone’s trunk was easy. Each of the five barracks was simply one long room, and the cadets weren’t permitted locks. The problem was, someone was always
in
the barracks, just back from a night run or catching a quick nap before Blood Time. Lin would have raised eyes and turned heads if she just started rifling through the sniper’s belongings, and so for a few days Valyn let the worry eat at his gut, tried to focus on his training, on his studies, and the upcoming Trial. Late each night, he would meet up with Laith, Gent, and Lin in their corner of the mess hall and exchange pointless observations and suspicions, marking time until Lin could find a way into Annick’s trunk.

On this particular night, however, Lin was late. Valyn noted the moon through the window, measured it against the horizon, and shook his head.

“Calm down,” Laith said. “Lin’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Valyn replied, but he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Ha Lin outweighed Annick and she was the better fighter if it came to fists and knives. On the other hand, most confrontations were decided by one simple rule: The person to strike first was the one to walk away, and Valyn worried that, in the crucial moment, Lin might hesitate. Annick would not.

“You ought to be concerned about
yourself,
” Laith added, gesturing with his glass. It was filled with water, but he waved it around as if it were a tankard and he were seated in an alehouse. “
You’re
the one slated to go against Annick in the sniper test tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the cheerful reminder,” Valyn said.

“You’re fucked.”

“And for the optimism.”

“Just trying to bring a healthy realism to the discussion.”

Once more, Valyn shook his head. It didn’t help matters that he more or less agreed with Laith’s assessment. Valyn was a capable sniper and a reasonable hand with a flatbow, even by Kettral standards, but Annick was a ’Shael-spawned
ghost.
She’d lost only one sniper contest, to Balendin of all people, and Valyn was pretty sure the leach had found some way to cheat.

To make matters worse, if you went up against Annick, you usually ended the morning with a black eye, busted jaw, or chipped tooth. None of that was part of the contest—you were supposed to sneak close enough to shoot a bell before your opponent, and that was that—but Annick made it a point of pride to shoot the bell, then the trainers scouring the field with their long lenses, and then her opponent. She used blunt training arrows—stunners, the Kettral called them—but they could still break a tooth or knock you stone cold. A year earlier some of the cadets had complained to command. If Annick was good enough to pick her shots, they argued, she was good enough to shoot for the chest rather than the face. Annick’s response, which the trainers had accepted with a sort of sadistic pleasure, was that if the people lodging the complaint didn’t want to get shot in the face, then they should learn to keep their faces out of sight.

“This close to the Trial,” Laith said. “I’d find a way to beg off.”

“There’s no way to beg off.”

“There’s always a way. I’ve spent the past five years dodging the worst of the shit. It’s why I became a flier.”

“You became a flier because you like to go fast and you hate running.”

“As I said—dodging the shit.” Laith’s smile faded. “In earnest, though, Val. If Annick really
is
trying to kill you because of what you know about Amie, you don’t want to be within a mile of the sniper field with her.”

Valyn had thought much the same thing, but he’d be shipped to ’Shael before he let another cadet, murderer or no, scare him out of his training. “There’ll be two trainers watching the test with long lenses,” he reminded his friend. “She’d be crazy to take a shot at me then.”

“Suit yourself,” Laith said with a shrug. “I’ll pour some ale on your grave.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but it struck too close to the memory of the night they had buried Amie. Laith took a long swig of his water, scowled as though wishing it were something stronger, and the two fell into a gloomy silence. Lin found them in much the same position when she finally burst into the hall.

“I found something,” she began, eyes fierce.

Valyn motioned her to a seat, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure they had the hall to themselves.

“You know what the girl uses her ’Kent-kissing trunk for?” Lin asked as she slid onto the bench next to Laith.

“Epistles of unrequited love?” the flier suggested.

Lin coughed out a laugh. “Guess again.”

“A small orpaned infant that she has been secretly but tenderly nursing back to health?”

“Arrows,” Lin said.

“Just arrows?” Valyn asked, confused. It hardly sounded like a revelation.

“Must be more than a thousand of them in there,” Lin went on. “She makes her own. Strips the shafts, hammers out her own heads at the forge, even fletches the things with some kind of strange feather—northern black goose, or some shit. She’s got enough to kill everyone on the Islands a few times over. I almost didn’t bother to dig through them all.”